Various multi-computing architectures are known from the prior art where a plurality of processing units is coupled to form a cluster. Such architectures are used in parallel processing and also in the emerging field of blade computing.
Blade computing relies on blade servers, which are modular, single-board computers. An overview of blade computing is given in “Architectures and Infrastructure for Blade Computing”, September 2002, Sun Microsystems and “THE NEXT WAVE: BLADE SERVER COMPUTING”, Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com/servers/entry/blade).
A content load balancing blade is commercially available from Sun microsystems (“Sun Fire™ B10n). This blade provides traffic and content management functionalities. Content load balancing is achieved based on URLs, CGI scripts and cookies; server load balancing is achieved based on server loads, response times, and weighted round-robin algorithms.
US patent application no. 20030105903 shows a web edge server, which comprises a number of blade servers. A switch and an information distribution module are provided for the purpose of balancing. The information distribution module receives an information message, performs processing on the message to determine a destination, and forwards a message toward the determined destination via an internal communications network.